Academic • Consultant • Entrepreneur
Impact investing is a new and growing field in which financial institutions and individuals invest their money not only for financial return, but also for social and environmental impact. The field is in such a state of rapid growth that Antony Bugg-Levine and Jed Emerson, two central players in this arena, recently described impact investing …
Continue reading "Visualizing the GIIN Impact Investing Network with Neo4j"
The future of PFS,” argue V. Kasturi Rangan and Lisa A. Chase [in The Payoff of Pay For Success], “lies in aligning with impact-seeking investors, not return-seeking investors.” Should it? Or should Pay-For-Success (PFS) designers continue to make an effort to bring return-seeking capital to the table? Based on the principles of the organizational theory …
Continue reading "Response to “The Payoff of Pay-for-Success”"
Just for kicks, the UnLtd USA team put together a network map of the Austin social enterprise scene. Below is a screenshot; click on it to go to the interactive map. Special thanks to Jeff and the Kumu team for helping us put this together.
Below is the second half of an essay that I put together for Alex Nicholls' Social Entrepreneurship course at Oxford's Saïd Business School. It is verbose, thanks to an academic word count target. The nut graf, as my friend Ben has taught me to call it, is that I believe that social enterprises (businesses that hope to have a positive social impact …
Continue reading "Toward a practical, impact-focused classification of social enterprises"
Below is the first half of an essay that I put together for Alex Nicholls' Social Entrepreneurship course at Oxford's Saïd Business School. It is verbose, thanks to an academic word count target. The nut graf, as my friend Ben has taught me to call it, is that I believe that social enterprises (businesses that hope to have a positive social impact with …
This article was originally posted on Vista Hispano as part of a series on Latino startups. For the rest of the series, go here. When Peter Wilkins of New Futuro set out to raise a round of venture capital this year, he found very few investors that understood his target market: US Hispanics. In the …
This blog was originally posted on Vista Hispano as a series on Latino startups. Read the first one here. Startup struggles, generally speaking If there is one topic that entrepreneurs love to talk about more than any other, it is be the trials and tribulations of being a founder. You work impossibly long hours; you wake …
Continue reading "The State of Latino Startups: Exploring the Challenges"
This was originally posted on the Vista Hispano blog. The US Hispanic consumer market is big. Really big. $1.3-trillion-dollars-and-counting big. Major corporations like Best Buy, Yahoo, and The Home Depot are paying attention and have piled in, attempting with varying degrees of success to capture a piece of this large and growing market. Over the course of the …
Prompted by Oxford professor Marc Ventresca, a list of potential topics for Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford in 2014: Machine learningand its effect on different industries (automobiles & finance being the most obvious both in application and in local networks) I heard quite a bit of noise at SVCO this year about Bitcoin. What about …
Just for kicks, this is a writing sample I put together in Feb 2013, two weeks before Hugo Chavez died. -- My turn? Rafael Correa angles for regional leadership in South America This week, Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa routed divided opposition to win his third presidential election, finishing thirty percentage points ahead of his closest …
Continue reading "My turn? Rafael Correa angles for regional leadership in South America"
Mark Clayton Hand, Ph.D. 